Wyndham's Theatre

Robert Icke: ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Why are there so many Sophocles plays on at the moment?  I’ll tell you: while about 95 percent of the press night audience to Robert Icke’s take on Oedipus clearly knew the plot already, you could hear every single ticket holder hitherto unaware of the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old play’s ‘big twist’ gasp in horror when it came. If they ever stopped horrifying us we’d stop staging them, but the Ancient Greeks were basically sicker bastards than everyone else in all of history. And so we love them: Icke’s Oedipus opens a week after the National Theatre opened a version of Antigone called The Other Place and a couple of months ahead of the Old Vic’s, uh, Oedipus. In fact this is one that Stockton-on-Tees-born directorial genius Icke made earlier: Oedipus premiered in Amsterdam six years ago and it now makes its English language debut after a long, Covid-y road to the West End (it was originally going to open here in 2020 with Helen Mirren starring). Icke can do fiddly and complicated when the mood suits him, but as with his phenomenal 2015 adaptation of the Oresteia, his Oedipus benefits from a lethal but compassionate decluttering, a singularity of purpose that distils a famously lurid story into something empathetic, lucid and quite, quite devastating. Mark Strong is Oedipus, a passionate, self-serious politician whose upstart party is on the verge of securing a landslide victory in a sort-of-British version...

Reese Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s long-running BBC comedy horror anthology ‘Inside No. 9’ may be wrapping up on our screens but the duo don’t seem to be in any hurry to step away from it: this new live spin-off entitled ‘Stage/Fright’ premieres in the West End in 2025. Written by and starring the duo, the plot is unknown but we’re told it’ll be a mix of old and new elements and that it’ll lean heavily into being a theatre performance (as opposed to just being bits from the telly faithfully re-enacted) – not a surprise seeing as how both creators are now seasoned stage actors. It’s directed by Simon Evans, probably best known for the extremely meta David Tennant/Michael Sheen lockdown comedy ‘Staged’, though also a heavyweight theatre director.

Over 17 years on from his last UK stage outing – with a Broadway Stoppard revival his only other theatre action in the interim – Ewan McGregor returns to the stage in 2025, reunited with Michael Grandage, the director of Guys & Dolls and Othello, the two Donmar Warehouse shows the Scots actor did at the height of his Star Wars fame. My Master Builder is a new play, or rather a new spin on an old play, being up and coming US playwright Lila Raicek’s reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Like many of Ibsen’s works, the 1892 drama could reasonably be described as ‘proto-feminist’ without quite being ‘feminist’ – one suspects Raicek is liable to tease the #MeToo implications out of this story of an architect whose world is rocked by the appearance of a young women who says he propositioned her in the past. You might further guess that Raicek may have jettisoned some of the dreamlike symbolism that mark Ibsen’s original – all will be revealed in 2025.